The Birds
At first, I was flattered. On weekends I often sit on the porch of our little house down FM 609 looking out over the property, enjoying a quiet cup of coffee before I start some chores. One Saturday, a couple of small birds, perhaps Carolina Chickadees (I like the name), flew around me several times then lit on a windowsill behind me. They set up shop for a little while, flying away when I got up.
When I bought the property a few years ago I converted the Ag exemption for cattle to a Wildlife Conservation exemption with a songbird emphasis, so I’m supposed to enjoy it when songbirds are attracted, and I have to say it has grown on me. I have feeders and bird houses all over the property and I’d like to think that I’ve attracted more than a few birds. With family and visitors I pretend I can identify all kinds of birds, but I mostly make up names and no one seems the wiser. I am pretty sure I can identify a Cardinal, but I can never remember which is male and which is female.
The next weekend when I arrived, there were half a dozen birds sitting smugly on top of both porch window frames and one sitting on the ceiling fan. There were a few white spots of bird poop scattered around, but nothing too bad. I was annoyed so I shooed them away as I sat down to eat lunch on the porch, oblivious to the fate that awaited me.
The next couple of weekends when I got there I grew increasingly irritated. My porch had officially become a bird sanctuary. There weren’t any birds midday on Saturdays when I arrived, but underneath both windows and the ceiling fan was an amazing amount of bird droppings. I estimated that dozens must have been roosting there at some point. Much of it was dripping down from the top of the windows. During the week I got innumerable alerts from the motion detector security camera on the porch and when I looked at the videos it was birds swarming around.
On my way to our property a few weeks into it, I stopped and bought some of those bird spikes to mount on the windowsills. At the suggestion of one of the salesmen I also bought one of those two foot tall goofy looking owls with the bobblehead which they assured me would scare off birds. I spent half the afternoon pounding the spikes along the window frames and window sills, then duct taping some on the fan. I precisely positioned the owl. I was quite satisfied with myself…until the next weekend.
They kept coming. The bird droppings continued unabated, including some strategically dropped on the head of the owl and my favorite chair. If I could just break them of the habit like a bad child, they would surely move on. It occurred to me to get floor to ceiling netting and block off access to both windows- their preferred perches. It took a couple of hours to put them up and the workmen doing some work on the house could scarcely contain their laughter. But I didn’t care. This had become personal.
The next weekend brought no letup in bird poop – inside, outside, and on the netting. Somehow, a large conical shaped nest had appeared above one of the windows inside the netting and already had some eggs in it. Birds were freely flying in and out of the porch, finding small gaps near the ceiling where the netting was attached. It started to remind me of the old Alfred Hitchcock movie, “The Birds,” where countless crows attack a city and one family’s house in particular. That movie didn’t end well for some of the characters, and I was getting more concerned. I was already having to spend an hour or so each Saturday power spraying the porch of all the droppings that I decided had now become a health hazard. My once beloved porch was now populated by birds constantly flying in and out, bird droppings, spikes, a fake owl with poop on his head, and netting that gave the porch the look of a cheap seafood restaurant.
Once the hatchlings had left their nest, I was considering torching the place just to get even, when a neighbor suggested spraying “Flock Free” spray (plant oil/nontoxic) on their perches and another friend suggested some sort of dangling, shiney, twizler- like objects that hang from the ceiling. Amazon calls them “reflective scare rods.” Apparently the reflection and spiraling movement in the breeze disorients the birds and they stay away. Down came the netting and the spikes and the owl became a bow and arrow target. I sprayed the sticky liquid around the windows and hung three dozen scare rods from the ceiling and …. the birds stayed away. All of them. This sorry episode of city boy vs. country birds is over. The porch looks like a tinseled Christmas tree without the tree, but the birds are gone ̶ taking with them some of my pride.
Now I sip my coffee surrounded by scare rods instead of birds, but sometimes I wonder: are the bird songs I hear from nearby trees actually the laughter of Carolina Chickadees, or is it just my imagination?